NATIONAL & WORLD DIGEST March 10, 2007

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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/10/AR2007031000162_pf.html

Giuliani's Private Life May Hurt His Run

By MARC HUMBERT
The Associated Press
Saturday, March 10, 2007; 2:26 AM

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Ronald Reagan was divorced, had chilly relations with some of his children, and still easily won two terms as president. Rudy Giuliani has been thrice married and twice divorced, has chilly relations with his children, and wants to be elected president.

Twenty-seven years after Reagan became the only divorced candidate to win the presidency, the former New York City mayor is hoping that when it comes to family values, voters will be as accommodating.

They may not be.

Republican strategists say Giuliani's troubled family relationships are likely to hinder his standing among conservatives who already have questions about his positions on social issues. They say the estrangement could raise a question in voters' minds: If Giuliani can't keep his family together, how will he keep the country together?

In fact, Giuliani's support for abortion and gay rights, his backing of gun control measures and his very New Yorkness already had given conservatives pause about his candidacy. He has also marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu.



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The LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-evangelicals10mar10,1,2167634,print.story?coll=la-news-politics-national

Evangelicals battle over agenda, environment

Global warming and other causes stray too far from battles on abortion, gay rights and similar 'great moral issues,' some leaders say.
By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer

March 10, 2007

A struggle for control of the evangelical agenda intensified this week, with some leaders declaring that the focus has strayed too far from their signature battles against abortion and gay rights.

Those issues defined the evangelical movement for more than two decades - and cemented ties with the Republican Party. But in a caustic letter, leaders of the religious right warned that these "great moral issues of our time" were being displaced by a "divisive and dangerous" alignment with the left on global warming.

A new generation of pastors has expanded the definition of moral issues to include not only global warming, but an array of causes. Quoting Scripture and invoking Jesus, they're calling for citizenship for illegal immigrants, niversal healthcare and caps on carbon emissions.

The best-known champion of such causes, the Rev. Jim Wallis, this week challenged conservative crusader James C. Dobson, the chairman of Focus on the Family, to a debate on evangelical priorities.

"Are the only really 'great moral issues' those concerning abortion, gay marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence?" Wallis asked in his challenge. "How about the reality of 3 billion of God's children living on less than $2 per day? . What about pandemics like HIV/AIDS . [and] disastrous wars like Iraq?"

A Focus on the Family vice president, Tom Minnery, said he would be happy to take up that debate. Dobson himself, Minnery said, is busy writing a book on child rearing.



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USA Today

http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Pentagon+struggles+to+find+fresh+troops+-+USATODAY.com&expire=&urlID=21485217&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fwashington%2F2007-03-10-pentagon-struggles_N.htm&partnerID=1660

Pentagon struggles to find fresh troops

By Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Military leaders are struggling to choose Army units to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan longer or go there earlier than planned, but five years of war have made fresh troops harder to find.

Faced with a military buildup in Iraq that could drag into next year, Pentagon officials are trying to identify enough units to keep up to 20 brigade combat teams in Iraq. A brigade usually has about 3,500 troops.

The likely result will be extending the deployments of brigades scheduled to come home at the end of the summer, and sending others earlier than scheduled.

Final decisions - which have not yet been made - would come as Congress is considering ways to force President Bush to wind down the war, despite his vow that he would veto such legislation.



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USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-03-10-pentagon-struggles_N.htm

Pentagon struggles to find fresh troops

By Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Military leaders are struggling to choose Army units to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan longer or go there earlier than planned, but five years of war have made fresh troops harder to find.

Faced with a military buildup in Iraq that could drag into next year, Pentagon officials are trying to identify enough units to keep up to 20 brigade combat teams in Iraq. A brigade usually has about 3,500 troops.

The likely result will be extending the deployments of brigades scheduled to come home at the end of the summer, and sending others earlier than scheduled.

Final decisions - which have not yet been made - would come as Congress is onsidering ways to force President Bush to wind down the war, despite his vow that he would veto such legislation.

In the freshest indication of the relentless demands for troops in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of coalition forces in the north, toldreporters Friday that his troops have picked up the pace of their attacks on the enemy in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad.



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Boston.com

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/10/cheneys_still_dangerous?mode=PF

ROBERT KUTTNER
Cheney's still dangerous

By Robert Kuttner | March 10, 2007
ONE BUMPER STICKER proposes: Impeach Cheney First.

Vice President Dick Cheney has now suffered back-to-back humiliations, with the conviction of his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, and the wresting of key foreign policy decisions by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But if anything, he is even more dangerous wounded.

The Bush administration keeps handing the opposition party loaded guns, the latest being the clumsy, politically motivated firings of eight US attorneys, a rare oasis of professionalism. These prosecutors are appointed by the president, but, unlike ordinary presidential appointees, they are not normally removed except for cause.

In every case, the purpose seems to have been either to punish a prosecutor who did not capitulate to political pressure or to open up a slot for up-and-coming politicians. All this will now be laid bare in congressional investigations.

In another new case of lawlessness, the Justice Department's own inspector general issued a withering report on how the FBI has issued thousands of "administrative" subpoenas, fishing for information without the knowledge of the target. These are permitted under the Patriot Act, subject to narrow guidelines and special "exigencies," but the FBI has not been following its own internal rules.

With Democrats now in the congressional majority, the administration has lately been running on two tracks. On one track, grown-ups seem to have regained a measure of control. Rice was able to negotiate a long-delayed deal with the North Koreans to limit that nation's nuclear ambitions in exchange for the beginning of normalized relations. The deal has been available for six years. Rice was able to win its approval only by keeping Cheney out of the loop and requesting National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to take the agreement directly to President Bush.

This weekend's regional diplomatic conference on Iraq, with representatives of the Iranian government sitting with US envoys, also represents a victory of pragmatists over extremists. The US line, dictated by Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had been that we can't talk directly to Iranians as long as they are pursuing nuclear weapons. That strategy had produced a stalemate, and US threats to bomb Iran -- which mainly frightened the Europeans and our few remaining Middle East allies. Bush has pulled back from that course, and is now willing to try direct diplomacy -- another setback for Cheney.



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Boston.com

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/03/10/falwell_invites_gingrich_to_give_address?mode=PF

Falwell invites Gingrich to give address
March 10, 2007

LYNCHBURG, Va. --Newt Gingrich's admission of an extramarital affair as he pursued President Clinton's impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky scandal has won praise from another conservative Christian leader: the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

It's also helped to gain Gingrich an invitation to deliver the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University. Gingrich is considered a possible republican presidential contender, although he has not announced any intention to run.

In an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson that aired Friday, Gingrich admitted to the affair in 1998. In 2000, he divorced his second wife, Marianne, after his attorneys acknowledged his relationship with Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide now his wife.

"He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations," Falwell wrote in a weekly newsletter sent Friday to members of the Moral Majority Coalition and The Liberty Alliance. "And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God's forgiveness."

Gingrich, 63, a former Georgia congressman who served as Republican speaker of the House after leading the party to its first House majority in 40 years, has been married three times. He has supported a family-values agenda as a candidate, and his two divorces have sparked reports of extramarital affairs as well as charges of hypocrisy from critics.



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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/washington/10memo.html?ei=5040&en=08b9d390d665c354&ex=1174194000&adxnnl=0&partner=MOREOVERNEWS&adxnnlx=1173535345-PwtzS1d2/eYzIsyDzmAI9A&pagewanted=print

March 10, 2007
Congressional Memo: Democrats Steer the War in Iraq in Fits and Starts
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, March 9 - Over the next few weeks, the new Democratic Congressional majority will try to translate public discontent with the war in Iraq into actual policy, with a series of votes on the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq - the party's most consequential votes yet.

But the Democrats face some extraordinary political and institutional hurdles, which explain why Congress wades so reluctantly - and at times so achingly incrementally - into matters of war, veteran lawmakers say.

In the House, the Democratic majority stretches from nervous centrists and onservatives, reluctant to encroach on the prerogative of the commander in chief, to an antiwar contingent that wants to force the president to begin an immediate withdrawal. Democratic strategists say they hope and believe they have found a legislative formula for an Iraq spending bill that can hold that sprawling majority, with a timetable for withdrawal of American combat troops in 2008.

But it has been a close call.

Some on the left are anguished, believing that years of struggle against the war should now pay off, without further delay. "This is a true vote of conscience for me," said Representative Lynn Woolsey, a California Democrat who voted against the Iraq war resolution in 2002 and against every spending bill for the war since. She plans to do so again. If the Republicans stand united against the spending measure, as their leaders are threatening, the Democrats cannot afford to lose more than a dozen or so of their 233 votes.



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MiamiHerald.com

http://www.miamiherald.com/889/story/36745.html

Posted on Sat, Mar. 10, 2007
Spring forward a bit earlier this year

A traditional rite of spring, setting the clocks forward, comes early this year.

Most of the nation switches to daylight saving time early Sunday morning. The change comes a few weeks earlier than it used to, thanks to a change in the law. Daylight time will last until Nov. 4 this year.

It's also a good time to put new batteries in warning devices such as smoke detectors and hazard warning radios.

Some parts of the country don't observe daylight saving time. Those include Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas.



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MiamiHerald.com

http://www.miamiherald.com/285/v-print/story/31444.html

Posted on Mon, Mar. 05, 2007
Slave link points to problem that never goes away
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com

Somewhere, the gods of irony are laughing.

Can you blame them? Last week came news that ancestry.com, a genealogical website, had documented a startling link between two very unalike men. It turns out an ancestor of the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond once owned an ancestor of the Rev. Al Sharpton. Two icons of 20th century racial politics -- the one a strident foe of integration, the other regarded by some as a boogeyman of racial activism -- linked by ownership.

Somewhere, the gods are amused.

Sharpton is not. He has pronounced himself torn by conflicting emotion: humiliation, anger, pride, and, above all, shock.

The reaction from Thurmond's family, meanwhile, has been characterized by that curious shrug of shoulders, that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal.



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MiamiHerald.com

http://www.miamiherald.com/851/v-print/story/35932.html

Posted on Fri, Mar. 09, 2007
Does bipartisanship have a chance?
BY DAVID S. BRODER

It was not nostalgia or the desire for companionship that brought four former Senate leaders together in a meeting room on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning -- but rather a sense of alarm at the breakdown in civility and at the fierce partisanship that has infected Congress and blocked action on national priorities.

Politely but firmly, not wanting to criticize their successors in what styles itself as a great deliberative body, the two Republicans and two Democrats who once tried to run the place warned that something had gone awry.

With a 51-49 division in the Senate, neither party has been able to advance an agenda. The war issue has stalemated debate on any other topic. Republicans have filibustered Democratic resolutions aimed at limiting the war, while the Democrats have banned the GOP from even offering its alternatives.

Meantime, the House, after a fast start rushing through noncontroversial items, has slowed to a crawl, filling time with investigations.

Howard Baker of Tennessee, one of the four former leaders, said that ``there is a growing view, and certainly it's my view, that while partisan debate is ssential to our system, it has grown so hostile . . . that it has now had a corrosive effect on our ability to govern.''



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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/arts/television/10evil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

March 10, 2007
Comedians as Activists, Challenging Prejudice
By FELICIA R. LEE

In the strange calculus of race, white people never seem to suffer as a group when their members are disproportionately involved in bad things, according to at least one Arab-American comedian. You know: corporate scandals, presidential assassinations, Nascar.

But Arabs and other Middle Eastern people "are the new Soviet Union," until some other group replaces them, jokes Dean Obeidallah. He is a half-Arab and half-Sicilian comedian (by way of New Jersey), and the one who came up with the racial calculus. He joins three other comedians with Middle Eastern origins for "Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Special," an hour of both gentle and acerbic yuks that flits from Islam to the erosion of civil liberties, to be shown tonight on Comedy Central.

The comedians say they see themselves in the tradition of black, Jewish and gay comedians who have wielded jokes as a weapon against prejudice.

"There's a sense of activism," Mr. Obeidallah said, speaking of his "Axis" role. He also helped create the four-year-old New York Arab-American Comedy Festival and Comedy Central's "Watch List," a new series of stand-up and sketch snippets shown on the comedycentral.com. "We want to show the talent and try to do something for positive media coverage in mainstream media."

Mr. Obeidallah, 37, shares the stage with Maz Jobrani (Gourishankar on the new ABC series "The Knights of Prosperity"), an Iranian-American; Ahmed Ahmed (of "Punk'd" and "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show"), an Egyptian-American whose name matches an alias used by an Osama bin Laden associate; and Aron Kader (Hrach on "The Shield").

The stand-up routines are knit together by the comedian Loni Love, playing an airport security monitor who confronts each man as he is introduced onstage by going through a metal detector. Ms. Love - herself a plus-size African-American who plays the part with high-volume vulgarity - takes on stereotypes of both security screeners and Middle Easterners.



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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/washington/10gun.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

March 10, 2007
Court Rejects Strict Gun Law as Unconstitutional
By ADAM LIPTAK

Interpreting the Second Amendment broadly, a federal appeals court in Washington yesterday struck down a gun control law in the District of Columbia that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes.

The decision was the first from a federal appeals court to hold a gun control law unconstitutional on the ground that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals, as opposed to the collective rights of state militias. Nine other federal appeals courts around the nation have rejected that interpretation.

Linda Singer, the District's acting attorney general, said the decision was "a huge setback."

"We've been making progress on bringing down crime and gun violence," Ms. Singer said, "and this sends us in a different direction."

By contrast, advocates of gun rights praised the decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, saying it raised the prospect of a national re-evaluation of the meaning of the Second mendment and the rights of gun owners. They said the District of Columbia would have to begin procedures to allow handgun possession in private homes unless yesterday's decision was stayed.



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The New York Post

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/us/politics/10nevada.html?pagewanted=print

March 10, 2007
Stung by Remarks, Nevada Democrats Cancel Debate on Fox
By KATE PHILLIPS

WASHINGTON, March 9 - Citing comments made by the chairman of Fox News about Senator Barack Obama, and under pressure from liberal groups and blogs, Nevada Democrats announced on Friday night that they had decided to cancel a debate in August on Fox News.

Criticism had been mounting ever since the Aug. 14 debate for Democratic residential candidates was announced last month. Liberal blogs and groups as well as some Nevada Democrats had demanded that Fox be removed as a sponsor, arguing that its coverage was slanted toward Republicans.

Nevada's Democratic leaders had stood firm against pressure over what had become an unpopular decision, until the Fox chairman, Roger Ailes, made a remark about Mr. Obama on Thursday night at an awards banquet here. In a series of jokes about various public officials as part of a speech, Mr. Ailes said, "It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?' "

As the comparison, however made in jest, traveled around the Internet on Friday, the calls for Nevada Democrats to sever ties with Fox News intensified. Activists and bloggers also cited Fox's broadcasting last month of inaccurate statements that Mr. Obama had attended a radical Muslim school while a child in Indonesia.

In a letter to Marty Ryan, an executive producer of Fox, the state's two top Democrats, Tom Collins, head of the party, and Senator Harry Reid, said Mr. Ailes's comments "went too far."



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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/business/10coal.html?pagewanted=print

March 10, 2007

TXU Announces Plans for 2 Coal Plants Designed to Be Cleaner-BurningBy CLIFFORD KRAUSS and MATTHEW L. WALD

HOUSTON, March 9 - The TXU Corporation announced on Friday that it was making plans to build two power plants in Texas that would use advanced technology intended to capture carbon dioxide before it escapes into the atmosphere.

The plan for the so-called integrated gasification combined cycle, or I.G.C.C., plants comes almost two weeks after TXU announced that several private equity groups led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the Texas Pacific Group proposed to acquire TXU for $45 billion.

Before the deal was announced, TXU, the largest utility in Texas, had proposed building 11 coal-fired plants to meet the state's growing energy needs, but none would have included the new cleaner technology. Under growing pressure from senior Texas politicians and environmental groups, the company shelved eight of the plants under the terms of the buyout deal, leaving a hole in the state's future energy capacity.

The planning for the two new clean-coal generators would potentially help fill the gap for a state where the population is expected to grow by 20 percent, to nearly 30 million people, over the next decade. But it also may signal a shift in the thinking of utilities that depend on coal to generate energy to try to develop a challenging technology that is accompanied by high construction costs.

These plants would convert coal to gas and separate the carbon dioxide, which would then be injected into existing oil fields.



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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/realestate/11cov.html?pagewanted=print

March 11, 2007
The Real Riddle of Changing Weather: How Safe Is My Home?
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS

BY now it is no longer news that people are jiggling the planet's thermostat.

One response is to go green: New Yorkers who were terrified into action by Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," are shaping up their lives and homes with a compulsion formerly reserved for the Atkins diet.

All this carbon cutting is a boon, and it certainly provides a moral high ground. But it fails to address one pesky truth: no matter how green New York City becomes, it remains hostage to huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions already in the pipeline and from the future environmental transgressions of others, facts made clear in the bleak conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last month in Paris.

With no obvious savior in the wings, there is a growing urgency that global warming be understood at a local level, right down to the block, starting with: How could a rising sea level and pummeling storms affect the trillion dollars' worth of property New Yorkers call home?

"It's all pointing in a bad direction," said Stuart Gaffin, an associate research scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University. "There's nothing good to encourage you to think we're going to avoid long-term flooding events."



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902353_pf.html

Report Details Missteps in Data Collection

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 10, 2007; A01

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 -- and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.

These are the conclusions of the Justice Department's uncontested examination of one of the most sensitive and widely used intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the national security letter (NSL). A report released yesterday by the department's Office of the Inspector General offers the first official glimpse into the use of that impressive tool, and the results, according to the report, are not pretty.

"We believe," the inspector general's office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, "that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being
identified or reported by the FBI."

The 199-page report, which Congress ordered the inspector general's office to produce over the Justice Department's objections, does not accuse the FBI of deliberate lawbreaking. But it depicts the bureau's 56 field offices and headquarters as paying little heed to the rules, and misunderstanding them, as they used the USA Patriot Act and three other laws to request the telephone records, e-mail addresses, and employment and credit histories of people deemed relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030901750_pf.html

Breaking Putin's Cordon

By Masha Lipman
Saturday, March 10, 2007; A19

The Kremlin has been sending persistent signals that autonomous political activism will not be tolerated. As a result, political action on the streets has become highly risky in Russia, and those venturing to participate in events unwelcome by the government should be prepared to get in trouble.

Authorities are anxious to ensure a smooth transfer of power after elections this year and in 2008, but enhanced restrictions on the freedom of assembly are creating problems as the political opposition manages for the first time in years to muster thousands in the streets.

Last weekend, in an unusually large political protest in St. Petersburg, several thousand people defied a government ban on their rally, broke through police cordons and marched along the streets of Russia's second-largest city. The event was organized by Drugaya Rossiya (Other Russia), a medley of small opposition groups headed by political opponents of President Vladimir Putin such as former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and former chess champion Garry Kasparov.

The marchers decried Putin and the policies of the St. Petersburg government. Many of them were beaten by police, and about 100 people were detained.

"I congratulate you for overcoming your fear," Kasparov told the crowd. The ictorious mood was echoed in some marchers' online postings. The demonstrators had a good reason to celebrate: This latest rally was clearly more successful than their December event in Moscow.

Then, Drugaya Rossiya protesters were also forbidden to march and were forced to stand in place: The 2,000 who gathered were surrounded by at least 4,000 riot police, who blocked off the area. This time police failed to contain the protesters, and, savoring their success, the protesters are planning a march in Moscow next month.



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/09/BL2007030901021_pf.html

Where's Karl Rove?

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, March 9, 2007; 3:08 PM

Denis Collins, a juror in the Scooter Libby trial, wasn't just channeling his fellow jurors on Tuesday when he faced the microphones and asked: "Where's Rove?"

Collins's point was that Libby, who he had just helped convict on obstruction-of-justice charges, was quite obviously not the only person involved in the politically motivated outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Rove managed to wiggle off prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's hook in June with a just-in-time recanting of earlier testimony in which he -- just like Libby -- misinformed investigators about his role. (See my June 13, 2006 column, Fitzgerald Leaves Questions Unanswered.)

And in spite of President Bush's assurances that anyone involved in the leak of Plame's identity to journalists would be fired, Rove -- who eventually admitted confirming Plame's identity to Robert Novak and volunteering it to Matthew Cooper -- is still on the White House payroll.

But since the Democratic sweep in the November elections, the "architect" of the previous three Republican victories has been largely out of public view.



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902152_pf.html

China to Create Huge Fund To Invest Part of Reserves

By Joe McDonald
Associated Press
Saturday, March 10, 2007; D01

BEIJING, March 9 -- China will soon create one of the world's largest investment funds, with ramifications for global stock, bond and commodities markets and for how the United States finances its budget deficits.

Finance Minister Jin Renqing said Friday that the aim is to make more profitable use of China's foreign-currency reserves, which exceed $1 trillion and which have piled up as China has posted huge trade surpluses year after year. Most of that money is now parked in safe, but relatively low-yielding, U.S. Treasury securities and other dollar-denominated assets.

"We can achieve more profit from the investments," Jin said at a news conference. "We are now preparing the organization of this new corporation."

Jin said Beijing may follow the lead of Singapore's Temasek Holdings, which manages nearly $90 billion in government pension funds and other assets. It owns stakes in Singapore Airlines and Singapore Telecom, as well as in banks, real estate, shipping, energy and other industries in India, China, South Korea and elsewhere.

Analysts have speculated for some time that China would create an investment company, and authorities have said repeatedly they want to make better use of the country's reserves.



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030901992_pf.html

E.U. Raises Bar in Fight Against Global Warming

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 10, 2007; A15

PARIS, March 9 -- European Union leaders agreed Friday to take the 27-country bloc beyond the targets of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, agreeing to legally binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the use of renewable energy.

During a sometimes contentious two-day meeting in Brussels, the leaders agreed to cut the gas emissions by at least 20 percent from 1990 levels in the next 13 years. They set binding targets for renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and hydro power, to supply 20 percent of the union's power needs and for biofuels to be used in 10 percent of the bloc's road vehicles by 2020.

European governments have been a major promoter of the Kyoto pact, which attempts to counter trends that are warming the Earth's climate. The United States and some developing countries have withheld support from the pact, saying it is likely to harm economic growth and is based on inconclusive science.

The agreement in Brussels was reached after months of negotiations within the bloc. Leaders said they hoped the aggressive measures would help persuade some of the world's biggest polluters, including the United States, China and India, to follow their lead.

"We assume leadership with this unilateral reduction," said French President Jacques Chirac. "This is part of the great moments of European history."



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902075_pf.html

U.S., Allies Agree to Drop Proposed Iran Travel Ban

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 10, 2007; A15

UNITED NATIONS, March 9 -- U.S., British, French and German diplomats agreed in a closed-door meeting Friday to drop a proposal to impose a mandatory travel ban on Iranian officials linked to the country's most sensitive nuclear activities, Security Council diplomats said.

The concession was aimed at securing Russian and Chinese support for a Security Council resolution that would further penalize Iran for its refusal to halt its enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

The Security Council has been pressing Iran for nearly a year to suspend those nuclear activities and begin talks with the council's major powers about the dispute. In December, the 15-nation council voted unanimously to restrict Iran's trade in sensitive nuclear materials and to freeze the assets of 22 Iranian officials and institutions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last month that Tehran had ignored a Feb. 21 Security Council deadline to halt its operations. As Iran presses ahead with an industrial-scale nuclear enrichment program, the council's major powers have been unable to agree on a common response.Iran maintains it needs to enrich its own uranium to guarantee a secure source of nuclear fuel for its civilian power plants.


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